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April 7, 2017
Cracking eBay’s Best Match Rank with Promoted Listings

What’s the code that every motivated eBay seller wants to crack? The best match algorithm, of course!

This elusive formula powers eBay’s organic search rank, which ultimately allows buyers to see your listings in an unidentified order. eBay has been secretive about this algorithm but it does give subtle hints about the magic that drives it.

Our experience managing eBay sellers here at ChannelAdvisor has given us the following insights into what eBay values the most in the algorithm that powers Ebay’s search results:

Sales history (if we were to venture a guess, we think this might be the most important factor in the algorithm)

Seller Metrics (eTRS Plus is king and it saves 20% in final value fees)

Price (hint: free shipping is crucial)

Newly listed or ending time for auctions (The time in which the listing was posted relevant to the buyer’s search query)

Type of format (auction vs. BIN —every search result page includes at least one auction)

Listing country location relative to buyer country location

Promotional activity

Furthermore, eBay recently released its Promoted Listings program. eBay has built a pay per sale (yes, that is per sale, not per click) program that stacks up well against the popular Amazon Sponsored Products. Promoted Listings is a great way to fast track the Best Match algorithm and push your selection higher in the search ranks.

ChannelAdvisor’s Autumn 2016 Extended Product Releasefocused on this program. Now, you can set up campaigns directly in your ChannelAdvisor account by following the steps revealed in this guide (you must be logged into the ChannelAdvisor Community).

This method offers the following three benefits:

Speed. Setting up campaigns one by one is painstakingly slow. ChannelAdvisor allows you to do them in bulk.

Organization. If all your products are already in ChannelAdvisor, you’ll know how to access which SKUs to place in which campaign.

Automation. You can use label rules in your inbound templates to assign SKUs to specific labels, which will then add new ads into the assigned promoted listing campaign.

Keep a couple of key points in mind when you get started with campaigns in ChannelAdvisor:

Set up your campaigns in groups; do not do them all in one unless it makes sense to your business. Ultimately, you’ll be charged a percentage based on the product sold, so you want to be in a position that allows you to toggle your ad spend percentage based on the profitability of each campaign.

Start applying your Promoted Listing campaign products to specific labels in ChannelAdvisor. This is one of our favorite ways to kick off campaigns.